wv wrote:

Yeah, but you like Old, Injured players
so…there’s that.

Only when they can’t play.

wv wrote:

There’s financial penalties. The league could sue to enforce them.

So, basically he can move, and pay a fine.

w
v

Which include, if I read it right, being cut off from that team’s share of tv contract revenue.

That would mean, in effect,that every dime spent on the Rams would come from SK’s own pocket…minus ticket sales, which do not compare to the tv money.

Rams need to follow NFL process to move to L.A.: stadium panel chief

By Sam Farmer

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-nfl-stadium-20150117-story.html#page=1

Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, chairman of the NFL’s stadium committee, had a simple message this week for St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who has announced plans to build an 80,000-seat football venue in Inglewood: Not so fast.

“There are still cards to be played,” Rooney told The Times in his first public comments since Kroenke unveiled his vision for a state-of-the-art stadium on the Hollywood Park site. “There’s still a process that has to work its way out, and we don’t know what the outcome’s going to be yet. That’s why we have league committees and approval processes.”

Rooney’s words were measured but his message was clear that the NFL is going to make the decisions on stadiums and relocation.

“I think we’re comfortable that we could stop a team legally from moving if it didn’t go through the process,” Rooney said.

The NFL does not have a strong track record in blocking teams from relocating. The only instance in the modern era of a team moving to a new city, then reversing its decision after pressure from the league, came in 1996, when the Seattle Seahawks set up operations for one week in Anaheim. But Ken Behring, who owned the team at the time, immediately moved back to Seattle when then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue threatened to fine the franchise.

In all other cases, teams that have moved have either been successful in litigation or have reached settlements with the league enabling them to stay. However, since the Raiders and Rams left Southern California after the 1994 season, the NFL has strengthened its relocation guidelines, and won a legal battle with late Raiders owner Al Davis regarding his claim he owned the rights to the L.A. market.

Rooney said he wanted to clarify the league’s position after reading the comments of Dallas Cowboys ownerJerry Jones that Kroenke would be able to unilaterally move the Rams without league approval. Under NFL bylaws, such a relocation would require a three-quarters-majority vote of the 32 team owners.

“I don’t agree with Jerry on that point,” Rooney said. “The majority view is that there’s a process the teams are going to have to go through, and I think everybody understands that in terms of the teams that may be interested, I expect that the process will be observed, and hopefully it will be an orderly process.”

The Rams have not indicated they intend to circumvent the league’s relocation process. Team officials declined to comment.

In a New York Times story on Monday, Jones said Kroenke had the ability to move his team even if the league attempted to block him.

“As it would turn out now, apart from the league saying no, you can move there,” Jones said. “Keep in mind that teams have moved without the permission of the league. They just have.”

In a separate interview with The Times, Jones said any relocation would be a league decision, but added: “It always was and always will be the decision of the individual to take the risk, pull the trigger, and give his energy and talent through the franchise. That’s the real decision maker. And we’ve got a guy that’s made the decision to be involved in some way in Los Angeles, and that’s Stan Kroenke.”

The Rams, San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders are all unhappy with their current stadium situations and have the yearly option to get out of their leases. L.A. is held up as a relocation option. Chargers owner Dean Spanos contends his club would be significantly damaged if another franchise moved to L.A., where he said at least one-quarter of his season-ticket holders live. He has said he would attempt to block any team from moving there, something that would require nine no votes from fellow owners.

The counterargument is that Spanos, who has worked 13 years to find a stadium solution in San Diego, has had his chance to make an aggressive move for L.A. yet hasn’t taken it. What’s more, the NFL has controlled the process for two decades and there is still no team in the market. In December, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell informed teams the league would not be accepting relocation applications in 2015, meaning the earliest a team could be in the L.A. market is 2016.

If three teams apply for relocation, but there are only two vacancies in L.A., one of those franchises would have to go back to the city it tried to leave, with severely diminished leverage for getting a new stadium.

“That’s why we have a process and why it’s incumbent on the league’s committees and league staff to manage the process so that, to the greatest extent possible, we exhaust the possibility of a team remaining in its home market,” Rooney said. “We don’t want to have a team that gets itself in a situation where it has to file an application and go through a process where at the end of the day it could wind up being a lame duck, or even worse, having to go back to a city it attempted to move from.”

Rooney also said a team that moves to L.A. must have a solid stadium plan in place, one that has cleared all the required political, environmental impact and financial hurdles.

“I don’t think any of us are interested in having a team moving to a temporary facility without any of us understanding what the ultimate permanent location is going to be,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why we put the relocation process on hold and closed the window this year.”

Officials in St. Louis have met repeatedly with the NFL in recent months in New York and St. Louis, and the stadium proposal they unveiled last week was designed in part to persuade the league that a good option exists for the Rams to stay put. If St. Louis can execute its plan, said Dave Peacock, a local business leader who’s heading the project, the league rules stipulate the city should keep its team.

“The NFL bylaws are very clear,” Peacock said. “I believe in those bylaws, and I have confidence that we’re an NFL city. We hope the Rams are playing here for a long time.”

The league has also been in negotiations with AEG about a potential deal at Farmers Field, a proposed downtown stadium next to L.A. Live. In the 20 years since the Raiders and Rams left, the NFL has fostered the idea of competing sites to get the best deal. Rooney said that continues to be the case.

“I think next year is a time frame that I would hope that we at least go through a site-selection process and at that point are in a position where we have a site where we’d all feel comfortable putting a stadium,” he said. “Then we’d be ready to go through a relocation process where we all understand that there’s a first-class NFL stadium for a team to move to.”

InvaderRam wrote:

i wonder if the rams’ quarterback situation has offensive coordinators wary of taking the job.

Remember, the pool of potential OCs is huge.

All people are talking about right now are the recently fired experienced OCs (though KS quit, he wasn’t fired). That’s a small group.

But traditionally you also get OCs by promoting position coaches. Mostly qb coaches, but also WR and TE coaches, and sometimes OL coaches.

There’s up to 128 of those, potentially.

The thing is, we as fans just know less about that type.

Dak wrote:

I’m reading 11/22/63 right now. It’s a Stephen King book about a guy who goes through a time portal and tries to stop the JFK assassination. It’s over 1,000 pages, and in the middle of the book,

Horror according to King is about having to experience your worst fears. The most alien thing you dread.

So he ought to write a novel about an editor.

NFL exec: St. Louis must build new stadium to keep NFL

By David Hunn

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/nfl-exec-st-louis-must-build-new-stadium-to-keep/article_1683d7d6-ddf1-545f-9c95-5f5b6d6a4ff4.html

ST. LOUIS • Local planners must build a new football stadium here, or St. Louis will not hold on to its franchise, a key National Football League executive said Thursday.

NFL Executive Vice President Eric Grubman, who is in charge of stadium development as well as exploration of the Los Angeles market, came to St. Louis on Thursday to meet with Gov. Jay Nixon’s two-man stadium team.

Grubman confirmed, for the first time by a league official, that St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke is indeed “looking” elsewhere.

“I’m not going to get into specifics, other than he has said he’s going to keep his options open and he’s looking,” Grubman said.

Grubman also said Kroenke has not made it clear to the league whether he wants to move to Los Angeles. More telling was an announcement this month that Kroenke is part of a development group with plans to build a stadium outside Los Angeles in an area where Kroenke bought land last year.

League officials are not considering such a move, Grubman said.

“We’re looking for a solution to the St. Louis Rams to be the St. Louis Rams, not for some other team to be the St. Louis Rams,” he said.

Is a stadium necessary for that solution?

“Yes,” Grubman said.

Grubman said he came to St. Louis this week to offer the NFL’s help in development of a new stadium here, and with hopes that Nixon’s team will make progress on the plan announced last week.

Last Friday, that team — Edward Jones Dome attorney Robert Blitz and former Anheuser-Busch President David Peacock — proposed a 64,000-seat, open-air stadium on the Mississippi riverfront, just north of downtown.

It would cost between $860 million and $985 million. Estimates call for as much as $450 million from Kroenke and the NFL, and $350 million in an extension of the public bonds still paying down the Jones Dome, where the Rams now play.

The riverfront plan is the newest effort to keep the Rams in St. Louis. Regional officials have struggled for years to come up with a solution to an aging Edward Jones Dome. Kroenke, they said, never sat down to negotiate.

While the league has previously said no team will move this year, owners don’t usually tell the league how they plan to act, Grubman said. Certainly not before “they’ve fully investigated all the different opportunities.”

Grubman would not further discuss what Kroenke has said to league officials. But moving, he noted, would at least require the vote of 24 of the league’s 32 owners, and there is no indication that Kroenke would break league rules, he said.

Grubman also said that St. Louis can’t keep the Rams without a new stadium.

Two years ago, the team won a lengthy battle over upgrades required by its lease at the Jones Dome. An arbitration panel ruled in favor of the Rams’ request for publicly financed renovations worth perhaps $700 million. Dome authorities declined, giving the Rams the option to go year-to-year on their lease.

“The way that was pursued over the past couple years has failed,” Grubman said.

“The probability that that gets resurrected is zero. Therefore we have to look at a new solution.”

The NFL’s role, he said, is to help give the St. Louis effort “the best chance possible.”

The north riverfront proposal, he said, isn’t yet real.

“A real plan means that the steps are all actionable,” he said. “If you need authorities, you’ve assembled those authorities. If you need land, you’ve assembled that land.”

Grubman described the plan here as something of a race. Multiple sites appear attractive in Los Angeles. Multiple teams are interested. By necessity, the addition of a team in one city requires the loss of a team from another.

Adding a team to the league, Grubman said, is “not on the table.”

The league must have a solution here soon. Certainly by the end of the year, he said.

Is the Los Angeles plan ahead of St. Louis? “I don’t look at it that way,” he said.

He’s looking instead at what St. Louis can do: “Can you assemble the site? Can you assemble the financing? And can a business plan be put together, collectively, by all of us, that’s attractive?”

It’s too early to grade the St. Louis plan, he said. The location on the waterfront is “terrific.” But the league needs more certainty about the costs and the revenue.

The NFL is embarking on a market study in St. Louis, he said.

“This is a great sports market. It’s been a terrific football market,” Grubman said. “But I don’t know what this project is going to yield. That’s not just about how many fans went to games in the past few years. That’s about what the cost is for the stadium, how long it will take to build it, and what’s the economic yield out of that project.”

Grubman hopes that all of the St. Louis unknowns will be nailed down before he reports back to the league and owners.

“I don’t want to put any lines in the sand,” he said. “… But what we’ve talked about is we really ought to be assembling this plan this calendar year. Which doesn’t mean Dec. 31.”

Peacock later said that he met with both the league and the Rams on Thursday.

He termed the meetings “very good.”